This was the home of Muiris Ó Suilleabháin, the author whose memoir of island life became one of the most celebrated works to emerge from the Irish-language tradition, read and admired far beyond the Kerry coastline where it was lived.

Ó Suilleabháin was born on the island in 1904 into an Irish-speaking community, though his early years were shaped by loss and displacement. His mother died when he was just six months old, and he was sent to be reared in an institution in Dingle. He returned to the Blasket in 1911, and it was that island childhood, its rhythms, its characters, its particular relationship with sea and isolation, that he would later set down in 'Fiche Bliain ag Fás', published in both Irish and English in 1933 under the title 'Twenty Years a-Growing'. In 1927 he joined An Garda Síochána and was stationed in the Connemara Gaeltacht in Co. Galway. He resigned from the force in 1934 with the intention of making his living from writing, but that ambition proved difficult to sustain. He rejoined the Guards in 1950, again based in Galway. On the 25th of June that year, he drowned while swimming near Salthill. He was in his mid-forties. The arc of his life, from the island cottage where it began to that Galway shoreline where it ended, gives the ruined house on the Blasket a quietly melancholy character that no amount of scenic framing could manufacture.